viz.

Image Credit: The Independent

While Caroline Bingley enumerates the accomplishments of elegant females in Pride and Prejudice, Mr. Darcy makes one significant addition: “to all this she must yet add something more substantial, in the improvement of her mind by extensive reading.” This pivotal scene, in which Darcy hints at the attraction to Elizabeth Bennet that blindsides her later, may charm audiences in part because Jane Austen, like her readers, cares about the written word. Austen parodied the sentimental and the gothic novels respectively in Love and Freindship and Northanger Abbey, defended the novel as a genre in Northanger Abbey, and showed her characters equally interested in reading. Fanny Price rhapsodizes as she joins a circulating library and becomes “a chooser of books” in Mansfield Park, Anne Elliot discusses poetry and prose with Captain Benwick in Persuasion, and Sanditon’s proto-villain Sir Edward Denham fancies himself “quite in the line of the Lovelaces.” Yet reading practices today are not the same as they were ten years ago, let alone as they were when Pride and Prejudice was first published on 28 January 1813.

Libraries of Health and Complete Antique, Brian Dettmer.

H/T to Brian Gatten, Lauren Gantz and NPR

In honor of World Book Day (March 3--but it's not too late to celebrate!) NPR's visual culture blog, The Picture Show, featured work by Atlanta artist Brian Dettmer. Dettmer takes vintage books and carves them into sculptures that, as Mito Habe-Evans explains, "[deconstruct] the linear narrative determined by the structure of the book" and open the door for new interpretations. In giving new life to a supposedly dying medium, Dettmer's sculptures make an argument about the cultural space of physical books, now and in the future.